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- Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.c++
- Path: newsfeed.ed.ac.uk!edcogsci!jeff
- From: jeff@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
- Subject: Re: Why garbage collection?
- Message-ID: <DM5s1w.4D0.0.macbeth@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
- Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK
- References: <4ecmfo$as9@news2.ios.com> <4ei4og$la1@info.epfl.ch> <s08wx6akhlt.fsf@lox.ICSI.Berkeley.EDU>
- Date: Fri, 2 Feb 1996 17:17:56 GMT
-
- In article <s08wx6akhlt.fsf@lox.ICSI.Berkeley.EDU> marcoxa@lox.icsi.berkeley.edu (Marco Antoniotti) writes:
- >
- >One of the things that bothered me most with C++, was this sort of
- >"newspeak" which it introduced. For years people had been working in
- >Flavors, Clos, Smalltalk etc, and they pretty much shared a common
- >terminology. Then suddendly, we did not have "methods" any more, we
- >had "member functions", we lost the "inheritance" (pun intended) and
- >started "deriving classes".
-
- In article <DLywCI.LDG@research.att.com> bs@research.att.com (Bjarne Stroustrup <9758-26353> 0112760) replied:
-
- I think you have your dates wrong. The C++ terminology was picked in
- 1979. Then, the work on CLOS hadn't yet started, Smalltalk-80 hadn't
- been completed, and its predecessor was not well known outside a small
- circle of researchers. I don't recall the dates for Flavors and Loops,
- but again these languages were not known outside the AI community for
- quite a few years.
-
- I think it's fine to pick a different terminology for C++, and
- certainly so in 1979 when I don't think any OO terminology was
- widely established. I can even be helpful to have > 1 terminology
- if it lets us think about something in > 1 way.
-
- On the other hand, Smalltalk terminology seemed to be fairly well
- established by the time C++ started to be widely known. (When was
- the Byte Smalltalk issue, for instance?) (We might also consider
- the publication dates of various books.)
-
- Flavors was significantly before CLOS. Canon's paper is, I think,
- 1980, and it says a practical implementation was in use since late
- 1979. Other Lisp OO systems were used earlier.
-
- I knew something about Flavors (which is not really a language but
- rather part of various languages in the Lisp family) no later than
- mid-1980 (but I forget just when), even though I was not (and had
- not been) in the AI community.
-
- I knew something about Smalltalk as well, before Smalltalk-80.
-
- (Not that my knowledge shows very much on its own.)
-
- -- jeff
-